The trick and the deception: the snake charmers who capture our attention, our time, our data are the social media, “tech companies” and their “toys”.
In this poker game (in which when you haven’t guessed who the “fool” is, it means that you are the fool), everyone actually has their weak point. There are those who are intrigued by the flow of images, those who are intrigued by the flow of memory and encounters, those who are intrigued by the multiple bonds – more or less consistent, binding, long-lasting, sincere – that these tools offer us, imposing their rhythm and their grammar, which becomes language and sometimes norm.
It will be said that all technologies – communication above all – have only taken up the strengths and weaknesses of the world they described, if anything by accelerating the frequency of contact, digging out the niches of our weaknesses, syncopating the processes that revolved around them.
Detailed research now tells us about careful “product analyses” (that’s us), about complex applied psychologies, about the growing time we dedicate to this “mediated” life, taking it away from “live” life.
But – we discovered – they are much more. They are wonderful tools, we could say, and they allow us to do things that we didn’t do before, but let’s forget that they are free, if with what they earn technological companies rule the world, or almost. And the “side effects” are a flood.
And so, by moving the world and even its rules, they have adopted the worst bad habits of those who commanded it until a few – parameterized – moments before: the economy speaks of processes of concentration and wealth, never seen before, and of scientific profit maximization procedures, which undermine our tools for reading reality.
The paroxysm with which they are manifesting clouds Cory Doctorow’s thoughts. His creative “anger” manifests itself in the ruthless and acute analyzes of his journalistic work, while his science fiction stories and novels – in the best tradition of the genre – warn us of possible dark future scenarios, and his activism concretizes his action in dissemination and awareness-raising activities, also in his blog, which he updates constantly.
His acute, critical and necessarily peripheral gaze interested the audience at the Turin Technology Biennale, where Doctorow described a clear panorama, in which “Gigacapitalists” (cit. Riccardo Staglianò) deploy the turbo-efficiency of their mechanisms, and where few rays of sun can be glimpsed in the clouds.
The relationships between technological companies and their customers – he tells us – have even become perverse if, as is true, they radicalize the defects of late oligopolistic capitalism. Having obtained bonds of “dependence”, first by flattering common customers, then only selected customers, the largest ones, then only mere shareholders, the services provided progressively tend to become impoverished, while workers’ rights are debased and compressed, governments corrupted and the planet put in danger. A mechanism that repeats itself, shortly a studied “enshittification” which exponentially increases profits, and even degrades the battlefield, the “market” in its most classic sense, and therefore the competition.
It is difficult to think that “conscious use”, an “intelligent escape”, an “alternative practice” and support for “open source” are effective on their own: if de facto power, market shares and diffusion speak of a global phenomenon, only a legitimate and equally broad counter-power can oppose it and propose mitigations and necessary regulations.
Our hopes are entrusted to international organizations, the same ones that have worked in other similar battlefields, trying to stem de facto monopolies and cartels, which fatten shareholders and impoverish society. These regulators are subject to strong pressure, and only the support of an aware civil society, which runs fast, loudly claims its denied rights and also presses harder, can be useful.
All over the world there are signs of the implementation of regulatory solutions that seek to take up and update the principles of antitrust, offering updated solutions to widespread, rapidly taking root problems. In the meantime, “eyes wide open”. Our digital life needs to improve.
Portrait by jonathan worth
D.: The current scenario of the “digital world” is showing owning concentration processes, growing privacy issues, worries about the technology to come (such as A.I.).
But new technologies are born also with beautiful promises. As Monty Python says, can we “Always look on the bright side of life”, or not?
R.: I think all the problems you identified are actually the same type of problem. I believe that when industries become very concentrated – as they have – and not because of the “great forces of history”, but because we let them buy their competitors, they then “captured” their regulators.
That’s inevitable. When there are hundreds of companies, and they go to Brussels, they tell hundreds of stories. When there are five companies, they tell one story. It ended up that they are capable of violating our privacy, of violating workers’ rights, of violating our rights as consumers. Because they “captured” their regulators.
The problem with technology isn’t that Facebook lets you talk to your friends, or that Google lets you search the internet, or that Twitter lets you have a big public conversation, … the problem is that they have enormous power, because we let him take it.
But we can change that. Now we have the “Digital markets Act”, and the “Digital services Act”. All over the world we have a new “muscular” anti-trust, pro-competition agenda: in the United Kingdom, in Canada, in the United States, in Australia, even in China.
We’re getting to the point where people understand that technology problems are business problems, they’re not technology problems. They are policy problems, and they are problems shared with many other industries. There are only three very large shipping cartels that control all our sea freights. It’s the same kind of problem if there are only five huge companies in the technology market.
This means that we have a coalition: a coalition of people who may not care in technology, but who care about the concentration of large corporations. Why do they care that two companies own all the beer, or that one Italian company, like Luxottica, makes all the glasses and raises the price of glasses by 1000% in 10 years.
We are all fighting the same fight, this is the “bright side”. The “bright side” is that people are realizing that we’re all angry for the same reasons, and once we understand that we’re all angry for the same reasons, then we’re becoming an unstoppable coalition.
D.: Big trends, big decisions, big consequences, that seem far from our everyday life.
Your research is also taking care about what we can actually do to react, to reclaim ourselves the contemporary precious tools given by technology, to “build a better internet”. How can we do that?
R.: There are lot of things that contribute to the kind of Internet we get.
There is the norm: is it a O.K. for someone to use Facebook to organize a party, or is it like asking them to sit in a car where you smoke a cigarette, and is it therefore harmful to their health to make this possible? This is the normative question.
There is also a technological question: is there something better than Google or Facebook that we can use – or choose to use – or other better methodologies, such as free and open software? There is a commercial issue and a legal one. The commercial question: is there anyone who can sustain a rival search engine, a rival social media platform? And then there is the legal question, which is: under what circumstances can these viable alternatives be maintained? I think we’re realizing that big tech companies are no good, that we have a wide range of alternatives, but what we don’t have is a political framework.
For example, when Facebook started, everyone was using MySpace. They said to these people, “Come use Facebook, and to make it easier we’ll give you a bot. With that bot you will be able to log into MySpace, and we will tell the bot to go to Facebook numerous times a day, to collect all the messages that are waiting for you, and then put them in the Facebook inbox. You can reply, and we’ll send them back again…” This meant that even if your friends weren’t ready to leave mySpace, you could go, and still be friends with them.
But if you do it now, the European Directives on Copyright, patents, registered trademarks, commercial confidentiality, contract law, Facebook will make you shut down. While we have the technological means to build something like Facebook, but without suirvellance, we understand that we should all leave Facebook because it’s terrible, building a viable business that does to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace requires a change of norms. Normally changing rules is very difficult, but right now the European Union is more interested in changing rules than it has ever been. This is the moment. As we have the “Digital Markets Act” and the “Digital Services Act”, and the Europeans can see what Brussels is doing, and make sure they don’t let Facebook (or Apple, or Google) cheat. And when they cheat, they can call their member of the European parliament, their representative in the Commission, to tell them to do something about it. This is the moment we’ve been waiting for: we want our decision makers to finally do something for us, and we need to make them do it.
D.: Part of the cultural industry is suffering from a deep crisis: for example newspapers, music, … It has to reinvent itself. And we are more and more “renting services”, instead of buying goods.
We live the paradox of having more stimuli available, but the way to obtain them is creating problems.
Can we solve this contradiction?
R.: I think it’s a mistake to think that what’s happening is that the business model is changing, and that the entertainment industry isn’t able to keep up.
It’s the same problem: there’s a cartel in the tech industry, there’s a cartel in the entertainment industry. They fight against each other for distribution. None of them are good for workers, and none of them are good for the public. Take news media for example: of every euro of advertising they manage to get, 51 cents go to Facebook or Google. It is therefore not so much about the type of advertising, but about the fact that more than half of what is obtained is stolen by intermediaries, due to the presence of a cartel. We need to break that cartel. If you have subscribers who pay you through an app, Apple and Google take 30% of what you collect: again, they are stealing your money. If your subscribers are on Facebook, Tik Tok or Twitter, and you want to reach them, Facebook and Twitter don’t show what you posted to those who have subscribed to your “feed”: they have to pay, they are stealing money.
We have this idea that maybe what they’re stealing is content, that it’s somehow a bad thing that Google helps find news, or that Facebook gives people a place to discuss news, but it’s actually a good thing for news. The democratic purpose of news is served well by having people find and talk about news. The main reason why news companies are not paid, is not because content has been stolen, but because 51% is taken away from them, because 30% of subscriber payments are taken away from them, and you have to pay blackmail to reach the people who want to listen to you.
We can only solve this with rules. Not by creating a copyright that overlays news, but by making tech companies stop stealing. But this wouldn’t solve all the problems. Because news companies don’t want to pay the reporters. Giving more money to news companies would not give more money to journalists. Another thing we need to do is make sure our rules foster independence in news, clarify advertising oversight, facilitate payment processes for subscribers, and make it easier for platforms to reach specific categories of news, or for cooperatives of people who have been fired by large information companies. Because if you give money to big news companies, without giving them a mandate to use it, they will simply keep it, not to produce news. Look what they did at Sports Illustrated, … and others: they took a chatbot – not to produce “fake news”, as Donald Trump did – to write actual fake news, because they just lie: chatbots produce meaningless things. And they said, “What do we care? We will get paid anyway, for good or bad things.”
We need to make sure we give resources to those who really care about the news, who are not the owners of the media, but the journalists.
D.: As a science fiction writer you can face issues like: acceleration of the technology, the difficulties of describing complex scenarios, the need to be updated about the present – in order to better imagine the future – …
How do you manage to “balance” all these factors?
R.: I think science fiction has always been related to my political work. Of course, I am a novelist first. I don’t want to be pretentious, but a novelist is an artist. Novels are an art form, and the aim of art is to take the numinous, complicated and irreducible feelings, which are those of the artist, and move them onto a “vessel”: a story, a sculpture, a painting, a song, because the audience experiences this work, and some approximation of that irreducible and complicated emotion is reproduced in their minds. This happens now.
Now it happens that a lot of the complicated and irreducible feelings in my mind have to do with being absolutely furious about tech companies, sometimes that’s how it works. Many of these technology policy problems are very abstract and complicated, and difficult to think about, as well as extremely boring.
If you see how the tech industry works, go and read a tutorial, or watch a video (about platforms, for example) you notice how deliberately complicated everything is: as soon as they start to make sense, you fall asleep! But making art about, can bring it to life. And when you bring it to life, people can understand that behind all this complexity there is only a scam, a trick.
If you have ever seen someone who does the trick of glasses and balls, a “magician”, it seems very complicated, sophisticated. But there are two magicians (Penn and Teller), who do this trick – you can watch it on YouTube – slowly, and you can see inside the glasses, which are transparent. When you see the trick done slowly, you see that it is not complicated, it is just quick. Computers are fast, they can do the trick quickly, but if you demystify them, with narrative, with stories, then the trick becomes transparent, and you understand that these are not wizards, they are just scams.
D.: How do look at A.I.? a useful companion, a meaningful menace, a very fast and controversial twin, or…
R.: I don’t think Artificial Intelligence is any of those things. The greatest threat we can have from Artificial Intelligence comes not from the fact that it can replace my or your job, but that it can convince my boss or your boss to fire us and replace us with an AI that can do our job.
Air Canada – you know, I’m from Canada – is a monopoly carrier, as Alitalia was. Except that Canada is very big, and if the airline doesn’t go, you can’t go anywhere. It’s not like Italy, where you can take the train. Air Canada fired its customer service representatives, and they got chatbots instead.
There was a person whose mother had died, who needed a reduced fare, the one you get when you fly for a funeral. He asked: “What is the procedure?”
The chatbot said: “You buy the full fare ticket, then send your mother’s death certificate within 30 days, and then we will give you the refund.” He went to his mother’s funeral, got the certificate, sent it to the company, who replied: “This is not the procedure, the chatbot was hallucinating!”. He said: “Ok, but you owe me a refund” “No, we don’t owe you a refund, it’s a problem caused by the chatbot, it’s not our problem”. He spent ten weeks fighting with Air Canada, which always said no. So he went to the Regulatory Agency, spent another six weeks arguing about it, and then finally got his refund.
Now, no one else would spend sixteen weeks. We have a saying in English “There is never only one ant”. This person was “robbed by the chatbot”, but actually a thousand people were “robbed by the chatbot”. Air Canada doesn’t need to believe that a chatbot can be a customer service representative, they just need to believe that for every thousand people they rob, 999 will say, “The robot robbed me, it’s not a crime” and as long as they will pay the fine for one in a thousand will be fine. Almost everything we hear that AI does, and that makes money for the company that buys it, is not about doing our job, but is instead about creating a plausible story about why it’s normal for someone to get bad service, or are cheated, or have sub-standard service.
D: Self-awareness, culture, could be a solution…
R.: The big question is that we should have accountability rules. If the chatbot “lies” to someone it must be a company problem, if the newspapers publish a story that is not good, it must be the newspaper’s problem… we should have labor laws, which allow people to intervene when chatbots are used from bosses to train them to take your work… not copyright – it doesn’t solve these problems.
There are many creative workers who believe that when they have the copyright controlling who can train a robot with their work, then their work will not be stolen.
But you know, the New York Times is already saying they’re going to sell their content to Apple to train a model for $50 million. And the New York Times wants to fire its journalists, and replace them with chatbots. Getty Images, another company that is suing over artificial intelligence, is allergic to paying photographers. They don’t want to sue over image generators to stop them. They want to do them so that their image generators will remain, and then fire all the photographers. This is what they want to do.
Every boss gets terribly excited about firing workers, and if we think of it only as a copyright issue, if we think of entertainment companies suing AI companies for their workers, instead of for their shareholders, then we’ll be screwed, like we were all the other times. They’re not on our side.
We need to make sure we see these things from the perspective of work, not from the perspective of copyright. I am an artist, a creative worker. I am not a small company, which has to negotiate every single commitment with the New York Times, or Condé Nast, or similar. I’m a worker, and the way I protect myself is not with a negotiable right, but the way I protect myself is with labor policies.
CORY DOCTOROW